Obstinance and Obsolescence

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
— Donald Rumsfeld
I love my dog. The little guy is one of my closest companions, even if he’s a bit ornery, not to mention the product of unintelligent design. As with other dachshunds, he has some back problems. His wobbly legs are likely the result of being over-bred to match an ever-increasingly distorted ideal form — at least compared to an undomesticated wolf. Yet I still consider him a perfection of imperfections.
A lot of what I’ve written describes my theoretical and idealistic take on how things should be and what we should be working towards. There’s often a disjoint, in the real world, between is and ought, and a fine line between taking practical considerations into account when launching projects and instead feeling overwhelmed enough by existing constraints and other problems to believe we shouldn’t even be trying to improve upon things in the first place.
Having good intentions alone rarely gets the right stuff accomplished. The so-called “hillbilly armor” improvised by troops in the Gulf War, for example, could actually cause the opposite of its desired effect by adding to the amount of injury-causing shrapnel generated by an explosion. It’s not reason enough alone to give up altogether, but in practice, sometimes the best laid plans can have unintended consequences.
Even with the proper planning, the future is not entirely predictable. As Mike Tyson put it, “Everybody has plans until they get hit.” Testing new ideas therefore requires having the freedom to fail, along with being willing to admit, accept, and learn from our mistakes. As long as we’re prepared for the worst, we can work and hope for the best.
Our world has hundreds of unused highways. Some are retired or abandoned, while others remain uncompleted due to halted construction. These partial roads exist because of a regime change or other political shifts; economic factors such as funding cuts or fluctuating gas prices; and, in particular, grassroots movements and other community protests that successfully campaigned for the underlying infrastructure projects to cease.
The people who built the completed parts of such ghost ramps, I’m guessing, fully expected to be able to finish the job. I wonder what sort of unanticipated upheavals we may likewise experience that will disrupt our own lives. Furthermore, it’s funny to think of how while what we work on today, altering past practices, will lay the groundwork for future and further advances, those very changes themselves will also, if all goes well, one day make what we currently do obsolete.
It’s a worthy goal. The sky’s the limit, provided we don’t needlessly stand in the way of progress, or follow the misguided tendency of wanting to preserve unnecessary intermediaries solely because how things were done in the good old days. Just consider what may happen as more efficient methods of transportation are developed: autonomous vehicles, reusable rockets, space elevators, solar sails, and perhaps even teleportation. The road goes ever on.
